Dr. Ronald E. Mickens

“I’ll make some mention of the numbers in recent times, but I want to focus on African Americans who made contributions in science from just before the Civil War until the 1940s,” Mickens said in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where he holds the post of Distinguished Callaway Professor in Physics.

Mickens said he tailors his talks to his audience (“I just stand up and start talking”) and expects to focus in Woods Hole on the stories of some remarkable scientists who were able to contribute despite the constraints of their era. His subjects are apt to include Edward Bouchet, the first African American to get a Ph.D. in North America (Physics, Yale, 1876), and Elmer Imes, another physicist (University of Michigan, 1918). Imes was married to Nella Larsen, a novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, and was a mentor to James Lawson, who was in turn a mentor to Mickens.

Mickens is a mathematician and physicist who has published in a variety of fields and is featured on who’s-who-in-science websites (see e.g. Mathematicians of the African Diaspora). He has a long-standing interest in the history and sociology of science, and has written articles and several books on the subject (including Edward Bouchet, The First African-American Doctorate).

“I’ve been at this for 34 years,” Mickens said. “I became interested in African Americans in science through my interest in the history of physics. You can’t understand your subject matter if you don’t understand the players.”

Although he expects to focus primarily on history, Mickens said he will talk some about the current status of African Americans in science. In his own field, Mickens noted that the U.S. produces between 1,000 and 1,500 physics PhDs per year, approximately ten of whom are African Americans.

Mickens did his undergraduate work at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, graduating with a B.S. in Mathematic and Physics in 1964. He earned a doctorate in Theoretical Physics from Vanderbilt in 1968. He did post-doctoral work at MIT and was appointed a professor of physics at Fisk in 1970. He became a professor of physics at Clark Atlanta University in 1982, and since 1985 has been the Callaway Professor of Physics. He has published more than 200 research papers, written five books, and edited five volumes.

Mickens lists his current research interests as nonlinear oscillations, difference equations, numerical integration of differential equations using nonstandard finite different schemes, mathematical modeling of periodic diseases, and the history and sociology of African Americans in science.

Outside mathematics and physics, Mickens focuses some of his attention on the question of how modern scholars can keep institutional memory alive.

“Much of our history is disappearing,” Mickens said, noting that electronic communications is causing history to be lost at an ever-increasing pace. With scientists and scholars communicating electronically, letter-writing is becoming a lost art, replaced by e-mail communications that are often sloppy and generally not preserved.

“We may be at the end of the era of archiving information,” Mickens said. To help stem the loss of history, the Clark Atlanta University professor collects and sends printed information – books, programs, newsletters, etc. – to libraries.

Posted February 8, 2007